re: Fire fighting needs to be rethunk

quote:

---

So why do it? Honest question. thx.

---

Holy shite. I just hit the preview button and this is long as shite. Skip to next post now if you don’t want to fall asleep.

Because it’s a great job. Don’t get me wrong, there are trade-offs. I work 56 hours a week, but it’s done in 24 hour shifts. If you get to sleep all night (understanding that after years of having sleep patterns interrupted, you never really sleep all night anymore), it’s not bad. If you don’t, it sucks. But working 24 hour shifts means I only work on average 10 days a month. That means I’m off 20ish. Most folks work other jobs on those 20, though, to cover the gap. So it’s not all down time.

While the health insurance certainly isn’t great because any group is rated on what they use, and firefighters inherently will have more illnesses and are at a much higher rate to develop cancers and the like compared to the general population, the other benefits are hard to beat. I get 365 sick days a year. I can’t carry them over and retire with years in the bank, but I also get 365 days at the start of any illness I have. Say I break my arm and I’m off 3 months. I come back for one day and break my leg. I have a new 365 that starts that day. This is mandated by the state. And while there are some abuses to it, they crack down on it pretty hard and are allowed to do things that a regular employer can’t to do so. But for legitimate illness, it’s hard to beat. It’s all paid whether I get hurt or sick on duty or off. On duty, of course, falls under workman’s comp, but you get the idea.

Remember that 10% I put in for retirement? If I don’t die from cancer after working a 30 year career that I’m much more likely to get, I can retire at 99.9% of my 3 highest years of salary averaged out until I die. Plus a COLA every year. If I work 33 years, I can retire at 99.9% of my pay, plus have a separate account with about 300k in it in today’s $ that right now is earning around 12% per year. So another 36k added to my “salary”.

Those 20 days off per month I get I’ve been able to take the kids fishing, hunting, ball games, on trips, and doing fun dad stuff during the summer while the wife works. On the 10 I work, I’ve missed birthdays, first ball games, last ball games, first dances, Christmas days, anniversaries, get togethers.

I’ve gotten to be on scene within a minute of a cardiac arrest to hook up an AED and perform CPR and bring someone “back” to spend additional time with their family. I’ve also been on scene of a 3 month old who was killed by her loving father who rolled over on her and smothered her in her sleep who kept asking me why I couldn’t bring her back. I’ve helped cut people out of cars or from under cars who came by the station months later to thank us for saving them. I’ve had to get a 16 year old state trooper’s daughter out of a car who had broken her neck with hardly a dent on the car so that her organs could be harvested, all while he hysterically watched.

We’ve had little kids come in to the station dressed as elves to bring us cookies and treats on Christmas Eve while singing Christmas carols to us. That’s pretty neat. But also at the same time my wife and kids were spending it with my mother and my father who passed away the next year before Christmas.

While I don’t agree that we are “heros” as some people say, or more deserving of any more thanks than you are at your job, most of the public have a great deal of respect for us and our jobs. We’ll get folks trying to buy us dinner all the time or give us discounts at places. Then we have folks who start threads like this saying there are too many of us or that our jobs are wasteful.

We’ve had house fires where we were able to get a family member out and back to their family...something that an additional 15 minutes as suggested in this thread would not have allowed for. What’s their life worth? And then we’ve had fires where we...or they...weren’t so lucky.

It’s not easy to be the first one someone sees when they find out a loved one has passed. It’s also not easy to be a hypochondriac because you’ve seen every illness there is, and automatically by default you have everything because in your world, that’s all you see every day. But it’s also nice to be able to calm a worried parent down who’s child just had a febrile seizure because they think the kid “caught epilepsy”. Or to be able to tell someone who is freaking out that their fingers and mouth are tingling because they are hyperventilating, and not because they are having a heart attack. Or to get a ham sandwich out of a kids mouth who is blue from choking. Another 2 minutes probably wouldn’t matter there, right?

Bottom line, I could go on and on. I probably went too far already. I’m sure this will get “wall of text” responses. Whatever. There is a trade off in every job. There is more good than bad. There has to be or no one would do it. It’s a recession proof job that is very fulfilling, and in the long run, allows me to be able to take care of my family.